Tyson Kidd Recalls the Start of His Relationship With Natalya, First Experiences With Wrestling

– Tyson Kidd spoke with SLAM! Wrestling for a new interview looking back at the start of his career and more. Highlights are below:

On his Workhorse Fitness brand products: “He [a friend who had helped turn his life around after his injury] had been contacted by a couple of fitness people for me to either get paid or give me some supplements in exchange for some social media stuff. He looked into it and said, ‘Hey, what if you were to start your own? And right away I said no’…(The manufacturers) had different tiers of quality and I said, ‘Okay, if we do this, it’s got to all be top quality. I’m not putting out anything that’s not top quality.’ It’s been really awesome so far. It’s done really well. We are working on protein right now. We now have a couple different flavours of the of the BCAAs and the preworkout. And we have the fat burner, Melting Pot, which is awesome. It’s been a lot of fun.”

On his first experience watching wrestling: “I recently saw Brian Blair and he probably thought I was lying or embellishing, but I told him first time I saw wrestling, one of my cousins showed it to me. (It was a match) featuring the Killer Bees versus Demolition. I distinctly remember the Killer Bees and I distinctly remember Demolition. I’ve YouTube’d this just to see if this match exists and they do have a few TV matches so I know I’m not completely out of the ballpark when I say that I believe that’s the first match I ever saw,” the 38-year-old Calgary native said, showing off his photographic memory during an interview in a hotel room in Brooklyn. “Anyway, I watched wrestling and was completely enamoured with it right off the bat.”

On his friendship with Teddy Hart: “I went to school with Nattie’s cousin, Teddy Hart…He was just relentless about being my friend and wanting me to come to his house. He kept saying he lived in a gym, which if you’re a kid doesn’t mean a workout gym, but rather a gymnasium…He just kept trying to lure me. And he didn’t live far from me. I lived in downtown Calgary just across this bridge and he just lived on the other side. If you know Teddy Hart, he’s very unrelenting, so I went to his house.”

On meeting Natalya for the first time: “The first time I met Nattie, I remember it was at Stu’s and we were downstairs in one of the rooms. I was shy. I knew I liked her right away. I remember her telling me off sometime like, ‘Well, I know I’m pretty, I don’t need you tell me!’ And I was like, ‘What is she talking about? I didn’t say anything.’ OK. I was like, ‘All right, we’ll see, we’ll see.’ It was definitely on.”

On the start of his relationship with Natalya: “The show Mat Rats was coming around and somehow Teddy Hart, again, usually the influencer, convinced Nattie to be a part of the show [as a ring announcer]. Then Ted said, ‘What about a ring announcer who does a couple of high spots? What about a ring announcer who can do a Dragonrana or the Sliced Bread, if she could do these moves?’ Nattie was like, ‘I’d love to learn these moves.’ [Hart then suggested Natalya wrestle Kidd] It’s so weird. Our relationship is very unorthodox and it just kind of came together literally through wrestling moves…What happened was, of course I had a crush on her, we were wrestling and doing moves together whenever she was there. We had this beautiful studio, we had this ring set up and we had full access to it. I went and did this four-day Stampede tour in way northern Alberta, like Grand Prairie, like six hours from Calgary — crazy drive. [Natalya thought she was skilled enough to do moves with anyone, not just Kidd while he was away] She came in and was trying these same moves with (some of the students). We mostly trained kids from 14 to like 20. We had so many people. So Nattie, I think, tried a couple of moves with these guys and I think they didn’t go as well as she had thought they were going to go. But I think, in some weird way that’s what (triggered it). She was trying to fight it, and that’s what kind of clicked in her head that she liked me, more than just the wrestling dummy. I think after that little wrestling experiment where her ego came crashing back down to Earth, something clicked that she decided to stop fighting that she actually did like me.”

On working with the Raw women’s roster behind the scenes: “We gel well. I get where they’re coming from. It’s really cool because there have been a few of them that I’ve literally seen it click right there while we’re talking. I’ve seen it click for them and then they’re off to the races. They don’t really need me after that. I trained Nattie how to wrestle and I helped her with a million matches so I understand how to kind of work with the women, maybe not to the degree of Fit (Finlay) because he’s been doing it forever and he molded that entire division from scratch basically. But I think I’m not a bad apprentice.”